


A transport one cannot contain

by middlemarch



Category: Mercy Street (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Grief, Memories, Repeated Line, Romance, Waking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-02
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 16:28:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15867396
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: One key unlocks several doors.





	1. Chapter 1

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Mary said, sounding tentative, as if she shouldn’t have said something. Jed remembered how he’d let her go when McBurney sent him on that fool’s errand and again at the dock, when the stars were almost falling out of the sky around them. Her dark eyes watched him, waiting. He could see the pulse at her throat, the curve of her shoulder where her muslin shift had fallen away.

“I was making you a cup of tea. And I used a liberal hand with the honey, so don’t bother to scold. I’m inured to it,” he replied. She smiled at the common-place domesticity and his extravagance. He leaned over to kiss her, marveling again that she’d lived—and that she was his.


	2. Chapter 2

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Clay said. The devil, black and red, redolent of gunpowder and the shrieking scent of split flesh, nodded. It had been this way since the battle when he’d gotten the scar. When he’d nearly lost his head.

“I came back for you.” It was a hiss, a promise, a sentence. An eternity.


	3. Chapter 3

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Henry said. Watching Emma bustle about in the small kitchen, the loops of the bow of her apron strings always neatly tied at her slender waist, that same lock of hair falling in her eyes—he never tired of it.

“I’m not meant to be a layabed anymore. There’s work to be done,” she said stoutly, stirring some mess in a pot. He’d choke it down, whatever it was. Whatever it was, a few minutes untended couldn’t harm it.

“Work can wait a moment, Mrs. Hopkins,” he said, tugging at the apron string, watching her face as the knot came apart.


	4. Chapter 4

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Anne said. It was nearly nine o’clock and it could have been romantic on the veranda, the night-blooming jasmine following orders, but Mary Foster’s dratted stray was in heat and howling, and Byron hadn’t bothered to change his dirty linen for fresh. His cuffs were rank with blood. She hadn’t seen him alone for more than a few seconds the whole day through.

“Simpson hemorrhaged. Couldn’t wait for Foster to arrive,” Byron said. 

“Did he live?”

“Barely. We’ll see,” he said. He sounded older and she didn’t like it.


	5. Chapter 5

“I woke up and you weren’t there,” Charlotte said. The daguerreotype of Samuel didn’t answer but it had caught that look he had, just before she spoke. She fancied he might think of her between-times as she did him or when the light of the day started to fade.

“It’s good you went, but I hope you’ll come back,” she added. 

_To you?_ Daguerreotype-Samuel asked and she raised an eyebrow at his question, at her own imaginative folly. _Home_ , she would have answered if he’d been real and she’d have trusted he was intelligent enough to know what she meant.


	6. Chapter 6

“I woke up and You weren’t there,” Bridget muttered. Her fingers felt the rosary looped around her wrist—she couldn’t fumble with them if she tried. Her Declan gone, following his brothers Jacky and Mick, something had turned in her, a canker on her faith, like it could take a rose. She still spoke to the Lord, but she didn’t expect an answer to her prayers, not unless it was the Virgin herself, her accented voice like a hand laid on Bridget’s head.

“You can bear it—it won’t last,” the consolation giving to a laboring mother, to a mother laboring to grieve for a dead child, the last one left.

**Author's Note:**

> I sort of prompted myself with the repeated line which popped unto my head tonight. The title is from Emily Dickinson.


End file.
